Sunday, December 16, 2012

Here’s a fact you might not know – Connecticut is one of only SIX states in the U.S. that doesn’t havea type of “assisted outpatient treatment” (AOT) law (sometimes referred to as “involuntary outpatient treatment”). There’s no one standard for these types of laws, but (roughly speaking) these are laws that allow for people with mental illness to be forcibly treated BEFORE they commit a serious crime. Whereas previous legal standards held that the mentally ill cannot be institutionalized or medicated until they harm someone or themselves, or until they express an immediate intent to do so, AOT laws (again, roughly speaking) allow for preventative institutionalization or forced medication (I highly recommend reading the data cited in the link I provided in this paragraph, especially regarding what is known as “first episode psychosis”).

Apparently far left groups (the ACLU filing against the law here) defeated a Connecticut mental health protections law just months before the Newtown shootings. Their primary concern being that the proposed law would “severely curtail the privacy rights and liberty issues of people with psychiatric disabilities.”

“Disabilities?” That’s a nice politically correct term. Unfortunately nobody on the ACLU staff addressed the severe curtailment of the privacy rights and liberties of the victims of a person suffering from one of these “dangerous disabilities.”

And that’s all MOTUS is going to say regarding this horror, concurring completely with Clarice’s Pieces today:

So spare us all for a decent interval the long distance shibboleths of gun control, the amateur psychoanalysis, the morbid and soul killing paparazzi shots of parents learning for the first time of the slaughter of their children. Let's have a decent silence to contemplate the eternal nature of evil and the tragic loss we all feel.